1709677 - Spell checker should not flag hex letters UUIDs, IPv6, MAC addresses

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Spelling checker, enhancement)

Description

[shaunc]

Attachment: thunderbird-spellcheck-should-ignore-uuids.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.93 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Compose a new message that contains a UUID string, IPv6 address, and MAC address with lower-case letters like this:

Repository UUID: 2b3c9806-726e-48b8-bc8e-a15eb616878a
fe80::bf02:1187:5e52:e5cb
ec:b1:d7:50:47:bb

Spell check the message in US English.

Actual results:

The spell checker flags as misspelled all the sequences of letters that are of length two or longer. In the UUID case, it flags "bc" and "eb", suggesting the capitalized versions instead. (See screenshot)

In the address, fe, cb, ec and bb are flagged.

Expected results:

I would expect the spell checker to be able to recognize valid UUIDs (especially if preceded with the caption "UUID:"), and not flag any letter sequences within it as misspelled.

I would expect the spell checker to also recognize the valid IPv6 and hardware MAC addresses and automatically skip those too.

If it is to check them, it should instead detect not-quite-right UUIDs, IPv6 address, and MAC addresses, for example mis-copypasted or mis-edited ones that have an extra, or are missing, a single hex digit, and flag that for the user to inspect.